This article was published on April 13, 2016

Sketch 3.7 update rolls in awesome features for Symbols and a ton of small fixes


Sketch 3.7 update rolls in awesome features for Symbols and a ton of small fixes

Sketch has been updated to version 3.7, bringing in a ton of fixes and improvements sure to delight everyone. Most notably, Symbols have been completely reimagined — and it’s awesome.

The real pull for Symbols is that it better mimics what designers were already doing. When you create a Symbol in Sketch, it now copies the master symbol to a dedicated page just for your symbols. That way, you can freely iterate on your designs without losing the canon that got you to that point.

Changing anything on your master Symbol is also recursive to instances in your artboards. If you change a background color in the master Symbol, it will change the background color for that symbol everywhere you’ve implemented it.

As you might expect, changing a symbol in an artboard won’t affect the master Symbol. You can alter text, colors or style freely without worrying about losing all of your hard work. If you happen to be using a master Symbol in an artboard, changing aspects like color or text style will reflect in other instances of that Symbol.

Sketch 3.7 also offers nested Symbols, which allows you to drag an instance into your master Symbol to affect change. If you created a tidy text layer and wanted to add it to the master, it’s a drag-and-drop affair.

Elsewhere, Symbols (I told you there was a ton of stuff going on with Layers in this update!) will make appropriate changes to avoid overlapping layers. If changes to a text layer will cause it to overlay another element, Symbols can identify that and scoot the affected element along with the text to avoid problems.

Sketch also made iterative improvements to text layer edits, grid sheets, object distribution and autosizes artboards to fit your desired parameters. Vector parameters are also more clearly defined, and handle control points are also prominently displayed.

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